MercoPress. South Atlantic News Agency

Tourists left 2 billion US dollars in Argentina.

According to the Argentine Tourism Office 3,328,485 tourists visited Argentina in 2003 leaving the equivalent of 2 billion US dollars, representing a 37% increase over 2002.

The Tourism Office also revealed that Argentina will also be joining the Satellite Tourism Account, a system used by most countries that receive significant revenue from the tourism industry and which offers a more accurate mechanism to collect information about incoming and outgoing visitors and their impact in the local economy.

The Argentine Statistics Institute was contracted by the Tourist Office to poll hotels about reservations, occupancy rate, differentiating between domestic and foreign visitors. A second survey tries to determine non resident tourist expenditure and the main origin markets.

Based on these surveys the Tourism Office was able to determine that last year, 1,288,782 tourists entered the country through Ezeiza airport, representing a 33,6% increase over 2002.

The report also indicates that incoming tourism most expanded from Mexico, 69,6%; Colombia 67,7%; Brazil 67,1%; Spain 53,2%; United States 38,9%; and Italy 38,3%.

The evolution of tourism in Argentina during the last decade shows that beginning in 1993 with 1,9 million foreign visitors, the number gradually grew until 1998 when it reached 3 million. However in 2001 the financial and political crisis brought the number down to 2,6 million expanding to 2,8 million in 2002.

Further more the Argentine Migration Office reports that last year the largest number of tourists arrived from Brazil (206,828 by Ezeiza), followed by US, Chile, Spain and Italy. The following five were Peru, Colombia, Mexico, France and Germany.

The tourism industry has become for Argentina one of its main sources of foreign currency trebling beef exports and close behind overseas oil sales, according to the Tourism Office.

Investment in new hotels, resorts and infrastructure was estimated in over 300 million US dollars for 2003.